Chen Tianhua (; 1875 – December 1905) was a
Chinese
Chinese can refer to:
* Something related to China
* Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity
**''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation
** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...
revolutionary born in
Xinhua
Xinhua News Agency (English pronunciation: )J. C. Wells: Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, 3rd ed., for both British and American English, or New China News Agency, is the official state news agency of the People's Republic of China. Xinhua ...
,
Hunan
Hunan (, ; ) is a landlocked province of the People's Republic of China, part of the South Central China region. Located in the middle reaches of the Yangtze watershed, it borders the province-level divisions of Hubei to the north, Jiangxi to ...
province to a poor
peasant
A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or a farmer with limited land-ownership, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, three classes of peasants ...
family during the
Qing dynasty
The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing,, was a Manchu-led imperial dynasty of China and the last orthodox dynasty in Chinese history. It emerged from the Later Jin dynasty founded by the Jianzhou Jurchens, a Tungusic-speak ...
.
Biography
Early life and education
Chen did not begin his formal education until he was fifteen. He did study
Chinese classics
Chinese classic texts or canonical texts () or simply dianji (典籍) refers to the Chinese texts which originated before the imperial unification by the Qin dynasty in 221 BC, particularly the "Four Books and Five Classics" of the Neo-Confucian ...
from local teacher. He enrolled into the new-style
Qiushi Academy
The former site of Qiushi Academy () is historic site protected as a Major Historical and Cultural Site Protected at the National Level. The site was made a college campus by Hangzhou mayor Lin Qi in 1897 and became the oldest campus of Zhejiang U ...
in his hometown Xinhua in the late 1890s.
Political career
After receiving the
shengyuan
The imperial examination (; lit. "subject recommendation") refers to a civil-service examination system in Imperial China, administered for the purpose of selecting candidates for the state bureaucracy. The concept of choosing bureaucrats by ...
degree in 1902, Chen was sponsored by the academy to study in Japan in 1903 on a government scholarship. He became a radical politician soon after reaching Japan, and wrote two pamphlets which were popular among revolutionaries, ''
A Sudden Look Back
''A Sudden Look Back'' or ''Suddenly Turn Around'' (), also translated as ''Sudden Awakening'', ''Sudden Enlightenment'', is a propaganda pamphlet written by Chen Tianhua. It was originally published in Tokyo in 1903 as an anti-Manchu pamphlet.
...
'' and ''
An Alarm to Awaken the Age''. He returned to China after seven months and helped found an anti-Qing revolutionary group engaged in insurrection in
Changsha
Changsha (; ; ; Changshanese pronunciation: (), Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is the capital and the largest city of Hunan Province of China. Changsha is the 17th most populous city in China with a population of over 10 million, an ...
, Hunan. He was forced twice to flee to Japan after the closure of his journal Liyu Bao and the failure of a planned insurrection against Qing.
In response to Russian and Japanese imperialism in Manchuria, he used his blood to write a few dozen letters that were distributed in schools in China. He was an editor of newspaper ''The People's Daily'', and wrote a novel called ''The Lion's Roar''.
Chen Tianhua wrote in May 1903, a two part critique published in the Shanghai journal ''
Subao'' entitled ''On the Corrupt and Rotten Hunan guanbao''. Chen criticized the gazette's contents for being too militant, prodding it to add essays and news and to slip free of the provincial authorities.
He joined the Anti-Russia Voluntary Patriotic Corps and in 1903 which he reorganized into the Headquarters of National (Guomin Zonghui) along with
Zou Rong
Zou Rong (; 1885 – 1905) was a Han Chinese nationalist and revolutionary martyr of the anti-Manchu movement. He was born in Chongqing, Sichuan Province, his ancestors having moved there from Meizhou, Guangdong area. Zou was sent to Japan at ...
. The organization quickly evolved into the anti-Manchu Association for the National Military Education (Junguomin Jiaoyuhui). A few months later, Chen returned to China as a representative of the association to promote revolution. In early 1904 Chen, together with his fellow Hunanese Huang Xing and Song Jiaoren, founded the underground revolutionary society China Arise Society (Huaxinghui) in Changsha. He worked with other members of the society to incite armed uprisings among the Qing troops and secret societies.
He integrated traditional values into a pattern of racial unity in his pamphlets, which were read throughout the Yangzi valley. He argued that men are close only to people of their own family, and that when two families fight, one only assists one's own family. He argued that the Han race was one big family, and that the
Yellow Emperor
The Yellow Emperor, also known as the Yellow Thearch or by his Chinese name Huangdi (), is a deity ('' shen'') in Chinese religion, one of the legendary Chinese sovereigns and culture heroes included among the mytho-historical Three Soverei ...
is the great ancestor. All those who were not Han were from exterior families. Kin terms were infused into racial rhetoric that called for emotional expressions. "Racial feeling begins at birth. For the members of one's own race, there is surely mutual intimacy and love: for the members of a foreign race, there is surely mutual savagery".
In 1905 Chen helped
Sun Yat-sen
Sun Yat-sen (; also known by several other names; 12 November 1866 – 12 March 1925)Singtao daily. Saturday edition. 23 October 2010. section A18. Sun Yat-sen Xinhai revolution 100th anniversary edition . was a Chinese politician who serve ...
found the
Tongmenghui
The Tongmenghui of China (or T'ung-meng Hui, variously translated as Chinese United League, United League, Chinese Revolutionary Alliance, Chinese Alliance, United Allegiance Society, ) was a secret society and underground resistance movement ...
. He committed suicide in Tokyo Bay by drowning himself to protest against Japanese restrictions imposed on the activities of Chinese students in December 1905.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chen, Tianhua
1875 births
1905 suicides
People from Loudi
Hunan First Normal University alumni
Chinese revolutionaries
Tongmenghui members
Suicides by drowning in Japan
Chinese expatriates in Japan